We continue with part four of The Journey and Exciting Life of Elizabeth Johnson Williams. Read from the chapter on Lizzie from the book Women in Texas. Women in Texas was written by Ann Crawford and Crystal Ragsdale.
The journey was a leisurely one, for a herd could stretch out for two miles or more, often covering no more than 10 miles a day.
Travel was often hazardous, for the trail was marked by river crossings flooded from spring rains. Amanda Burks, a ranch woman from BANQUETE, who went up the trail in the early 1870s, recalled t”he fierce electrical storms that dotted the Texas nights when lightning seemed to settle on the ground and creep along like something alive”. Lizzie traveled well, protected from dust and cold, swathed in petticoats, a full calico skirt, bonnet, and shawl. Armed with her tally book, she was up before the cattle each morning, counting to see if any of her precious herd was missing. She also kept a time, meticulously recording each hand’s hours, not unlike the record she kept of her students attendance during her school teaching days. When the herd reached the end of the trail, Lizzie was there, counting up her tallies and estimating her profits.
The Texas cattle business was flourishing, and Hezekiah and Lizzie spent more and more time in St Louis, stopping at the best hotels and hobnobbing with other cattlemen and their wives. Here Lizzie could indulge her passion for clothes, purchasing at last, the opulent velvets, Brocades, braiding, and laces that the pictures in Frank Leslie’s magazine showed her were in fashion. She bought high buttoned shoes for daytime, slippers with spool heels for evening. For the cold St Louis winters, muffs were both warm and fashionable, and Lizzie’s hats changed with the seasons, her flowered, ribboned, and plumed creations held in place by jeweled hat pins.
Back in Austin. The practical business woman took precedence over the fashionable lady, although Lizzie always dressed well enough to attend church or a dinner party.
Her practical everyday clothes were as no nonsensical as her sharp business practices. Quick and observant, she confided in no one and mistrusted the bankers and lawyers she did business with. She had little to do with her relatives. One time when her brother Will wanted to purchase a certain house, he found that his sister owned it.
Investments and real estate became her life. She invested wisely, not only in the building at 10th and Congress in downtown Austin, but in city lots on East 6th and West 26th Street. Her land holdings grew from acreage in Hayes and Travis counties to Piney Woods Holdings in Trinity County and ranchlands in Culberson and Jeff Davis counties.
Not all the Williams time was spent in Austin, for they once journeyed to Cuba on business, spending several years out of the United States.
One interesting story concerning their years there revolved around Hezekiel’s being kidnapped and a large ransom being demanded for his return. Without a qualm, Lizzie paid fifty oh 00 for her beloved husband’s safety, But some speculate that Hezekiah may have engineered his own kidnapping in order to have some money of his own. They arrived back in Texas even more splendid than when they had left, for Lizzie brought with her a flamboyant talking parrot. Met at the boat by a banker who showered them with flowers and reserved rooms for them in one of Galveston’s more fashionable hotels, Lizzie promptly spurned him and took her business elsewhere.
When Hezekiah’s health began to fail, Lizzie took him to a number of watering places, including Hot Springs, AR. When he became annoyingly I’ll from the effects of a lifetime of alcohol, however, she left him to his children despite the fact that he was never on friendly terms with them. Seeking sunshine and a change of climate, the couple went to El Paso, and Hezekiah died there in 1914. Lizzie sorrowfully brought his body back to Austin and paid $600 for his casket. No small amount in those days. She dutifully paid his funeral expenses and, Always one to compute everything in terms of cash expended, scrawled across the bill, “I loved this old Buzzard this much”.
With Ezekiel gone and her relatives estranged, Lizzie began to neglect her dress, often appearing at the post office, so shabby in her neglected widow’s weeds that unknowing citizens offered her money for her upkeep. Then, sporadically, she would appear in all her finery, heavily jeweled for a special occasion. Nell Cox Shelton recalls Lizzie’s attending a movie at Austin’s Queen Theater in the 1920s, dressed in an elegant black dress with a bustle, the prevailing style of some forty years before.
She moved from her home at the BRUEGGERHOFF building, piling, the accumulation of a lifetime into her tiny apartment and storing much of it in the basement.
Although her supply room was piled high with firewood, she parceled it out piece by piece to her tenants and refused to burn more than one stick at a time. When churches, public and private schools, and the University of Texas appealed to her for donations, she never said no, but kept them hopeful of her possible largesse. Her relatives felt she never cared for her family as she repeatedly refused to communicate with them.
Finally, too old and I’ll to take care of herself, the once fabled cattle queen consented to live with her niece, Willie Grier Shelton, and her husband. She enjoyed the comfort, the good food, and the Shelton boys, but she realized that she was not at home. At night she roamed the strange, dark house, repeating to herself, “this is the wrong street, the wrong street”! Perhaps she imagined herself wandering the streets on her way to the two story house where she had been happy with her husband, or on her way back to the ranch, or even as a young girl going home to the institute where she began her teaching career. When she died, her strong will and good spirit remained a memory for many people who she had known. The cattlemen whom she respected and admired, and the bankers with whom she bargained and bested, remembered her most vividly of all. She was a singular woman in the frontier world of finance, and she reigned as Queen of cattle ranching, a title Lizzie Johnson Williams earned through her own energy and wit in a time when the Cattleman was king.
